26 March 2006

Bomber owns flat behind Harrods

The IRA chief behind the London store attack added a nearby property to his £30m portfolio

Henry McDonald, Ireland editorSunday March 26, 2006The Observer

The IRA commander who organised the 1983 bomb attack on Harrods that left six people dead now owns a flat behind the Knightsbridge department store.

Thomas 'Slab' Murphy bought the apartment for a knockdown price as part of his multi-million-pound investment empire in Britain. Investigators probing his assets in Ireland and the UK found that the South Armagh farmer and smuggler bought a small apartment in Basil Street, Knightsbridge, for £80,000 in 2002.

The attack on Harrods was carried out by members of Murphy's South Armagh Brigade, which spearheaded most of the major bomb attacks on Britain during the Troubles. Some of the survivors of the Harrods bomb are suing the Libyan government through courts in the United States over its role in arming and supplying the IRA.

The inquiry team investigating Murphy is linking the flat to a network of properties in the Irish Republic and Manchester.

The Observer can also reveal that the Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) - set up to seize the wealth and property of criminals and terrorists - took 330,000 documents from five Manchester commercial and domestic properties last October as part of its operations against the former IRA chief of staff.

Following the raids, the documents were photocopied and shipped to the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) in Dublin - which is ARA's Irish equivalent. A senior Garda Siochana detective confirmed this weekend that the Irish police and the CAB are now working their way through the huge mountain of paperwork.

ARA and CAB officers have also established that, apart from the flat in West London, Murphy owns 300 properties in northwest England. The majority are ordinary homes but a few are commercial premises in Manchester, sources said this weekend. 'There was enough paperwork from the Manchester raid to fill an office from its floor to its ceiling,' one source told The Observer

He said that the flat in Basil Street is in an Edwardian block with a penthouse. 'The price was only £80,000 in 2002 because the flat came with an elderly sitting tenant who could not be moved,' he said. 'The 84-year-old doesn't have a clue who the owner is and his rent is paid for by social security. It's ironic to think that it's the UK taxpayer that's paying rent to the man whose activists caused chaos in England for decades,' the source added.

Just months after Murphy purchased it, a similar apartment in the same block changed hands for twice the price. It was part of a £1.6m portfolio allegedly managed by the Craven Group.

As part of a three-year investigation into IRA money-laundering, given the title of Operation Front Line, officers raided premises belonging to Manchester businessman Dermot Craven. Craven has strongly denied any involvement with Murphy.

At the same time a number of offices were raided in Dundalk to discover where Murphy's property empire - worth between £30m and £45m - is hidden.

Two weeks ago the operation against Murphy widened when the Police Service of Northern Ireland and Garda Siochana raided his home on the South Armagh-Louth border.

Around 400 police officers backed up by troops were involved in dawn raids on 74 Larkins Road, the Murphy family farm that straddles the Irish border. But Murphy escaped the net by three minutes - his half-eaten breakfast was still on the kitchen table when police arrived. Officers recovered £600,000 in cash and cheques, two laptop computers, 10,000 litres of fuel, 30,000 smuggled cigarettes and a highly toxic chemical mix to 'wash' 7.5 million litres of fuel.

On Thursday the CAB went to the Dublin High Court to have the cash and cheques frozen.